I�ve started half a dozen entries on a wide range of subjects today and I can�t seem to go anywhere with any of them. This may be the onset of a serious case of ADHD. Then again, it may have something to do with the array of phlegm-fighting drugs on my nightstand. So here are some of the topics you won�t be reading about here today:

� I am totally in love with my new cold medicine. When you�re an asthmatic like me, every time you get a cold, you fear you may be close to death. Or maybe I meant when you�re a hypochondriac like me. In any case, I love my new cold medicine. But why, in God�s name, did anyone think calling a drug Mucinex was a good idea? It makes me feel like I need to wear sterile gloves just to open the bottle.

� I have developed a strange obsession with the full-page floor plans of multimillion dollar New York apartments that appear weekly in the front of the New York Times Magazine. I cannot figure out my fascination, but every week I pore over them like a pirate looking for buried treasure. I try to imagine what it would be like to live in such a space, indeed what the space would look like at all. I imagine myself coming up the elevator in my lobby, lounging on the balcony, furnishing the sunken living room with mint condition mid-Century modern furniture. I angle my hypothetical grand piano for the best view of the park. The photos in the real estate section do nothing for me. But for some reason, the floor plans are my real estate porn. I cannot get enough.

Instead of those fine upstanding topics, I bring you today�s half-assed, cold drug-induced essay:

There was an article in today�s Sunday New York Times about two people in Westchester lobbying governmental bodies so that their children could play. One was working to make it safer for her son to ride his bike to school. The other is trying to organize non-competitive sports for kids. The premise behind the story is that kids don�t just play anymore. They need to be scheduled and organized. It attributes this state of affairs, with which I am hard pressed to argue, to parental anxiety about child trauma (kidnapping, abuse, etc.) that stems from an overplay of such events in the media, to parents panicking about keeping up with the Joneses, and to parental guilt about being too busy to play with their kids.

One thing the article does not mention is the change in community interaction. Not that I�ve done any kind of serious study of suburban life beyond my own experience, but it�s hard not to notice that people don�t interact with their neighbors the same way they did when I was a kid. One of the reasons my mom would let us run around the neighborhood unsupervised from dawn to dusk is that she knew every one of the neighbors. They�d all been to our house. We�d been to theirs. She knew all the kids we were playing with. She didn�t worry about us because she knew that if anything were going on that shouldn�t have been, one of the neighbors would give her a call and let her know.

The neighborhood we�re living in now is not unlike that, actually. But everyone remarks on how they�ve never seen anyplace like it. And we felt like freaks living here for a while (now we are somewhat reconciled to our urban-spawned freakitude. We cultivate it.) I won�t let AJ run around the neighborhood unsupervised for a while because we live on a blind curve and I don�t want him out in the street. But he and The Girl Next Door run back and forth between our houses to play. Whey they�re bigger they�ll be able to ride their bikes further afield.

But even knowing your neighbors is no guarantee of safety. There�s lawsuits to worry about. There are unidentified pedophiles. There are wild animals and drownings in ponds. There are crazy teenaged drivers careening down narrow roads. There are drugs (they are inescapable, even in the suburbs). As parents we feel like we need to be human shields for our kids. We are constantly on search and rescue missions, ever vigilant. I remember turning to sister-in-law while watching the scene in the Incredibles where Mrs. Incredible goes from defensive pilot to parachute to liferaft in rapid succession and saying, �Oh. She�s having one of THOSE days.� We shared a nod of familiarity.

But to what extent is this helping our children? Perhaps we are preventing a few kidnappings or car accidents, maybe a molestation or two. And these are definitely good things. But what are we losing? The chance to explore, to make the world their own. The chance to separate. This is why our children are never moving out of the house, why they call all the time when they are in college (or so the very same issue of the paper says, in its Education Life section). I�m not sure which choice is riskier.

When I was nine, my family moved overseas to a London flat opposite Regent�s Park, not far from the London Zoo. I went to the park almost every day. My school was on the other side of the park and when the weather was fine, we used the parks� soccer fields. I used to go running with my dad on the other third of the park. But the third of the park closest to the flat I knew like the back of my hand. I could map it today, I think. We oriented ourselves by the llamas, which stood on monumental mounds in the middle of the zoo. If you stood in a certain spot inside the park in front of our house, it looked like the llamas were standing on top of the trees. I knew where the good hiding places were and where to find the best trees to climb. There were puppet shows and band concerts in the summer. There was the ice cream man, the playground and the zoo; the rose garden and � my favorite � the Japanese garden with its half-moon bridge. I knew where the man who filled all his pockets with nuts would sit with squirrels crawling all over him. I knew where the crazy guy who wore a red flannel shirt every day of the year sat muttering to himself and where the policemen stood keeping an eye on him but never interfering. I owned that park. It wasn�t just the park, either. I�d walk the length of the Camden canal or take in a film in Camden Town. I�d take the tube all over the city � to the dentist for appointments, to my violin and ballet lessons, to museums, or even home from school after dark when I�d stayed late for a rehearsal. I learned all these things on my own explorations or with my brother. My parents were never part of the equation. I find it hard to imagine turning a nine-year-old loose on the streets of London today.

It is no wonder that parents are always complaining of exhaustion today. There is no rest. I hear AJ demand for one or the other of us to play with him at all hours of the day and I know it is a situation of our own creation. When I was his age, I spent a lot of time playing alone or in my yard playing with the neighbor kids. But AJ, like most of his friends, has not yet learned to secret of playing alone. He wants to be entertained. Oh, you can bring television into this too. But I don�t think AJ watches that much more TV than I did, which is to say that he watches some but not too much.

So how do you raise an explorer in this day and age without being accused of child abandonment? Does it really take scheduled unscheduled time or a government agency, as the Times article suggests? I�m not sure of the solution that balances safety with excitement. But I�ll soon be reading the book that tells of some children wandering in a park not unlike mine and encountering magical adventures at every turn � Mary Poppins. They, however, were under constant supervision of their nanny and they never played with other children. Perhaps all hope is not lost.

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